Let’s assume we are flatlanders (see: blog post 151).
As flatlanders living within a lower dimension, we would not be able to establish whether what we encounter is adequately understood through our existing relational organization or whether aspects of reality remain inaccessible from within it. We could improve our observations, reasoning, and explanations, but we could not establish from within our own dimension that our understanding exhausts reality. Nor could we establish that a higher dimension does or does not exist.
Dogmatism exceeds what this epistemic situation warrants when it assumes that its understanding of reality is exhaustive or beyond correction. Relativism exceeds what this epistemic situation warrants when it concludes that no meaningful distinction between better and worse understandings of reality can be made, or that the validity of an understanding is necessarily confined to the relational organization from which it emerges. The fact that we cannot establish the completeness of our own ontology does not imply that all ontologies are equally adequate, or that their claims cannot be critically examined and compared. Such comparisons, however, must themselves remain open to correction: we cannot assume that the criteria through which we evaluate different understandings are complete or beyond revision.
If we are flatlanders, a defensible response is instead to pursue new experiences and to preserve ma: the interval in which alternative relational organizations can be encountered without being prematurely assimilated, evaluated, or declared incommensurable. Such encounters do not guarantee correction, as no experience can, but they preserve the possibility of discovering what our own ontology makes invisible.
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